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Cruz's top quotes from floor

With his obviously doomed campaign this month against funding the Affordable Care Act, Cruz triggered a wave of vitriol from his fellow Republicans, who lampooned his outsized ego, over-the-top rhetoric and dubious legislative tactics. The avalanche of criticism both threatens Cruz’s status as a GOP golden boy — and strengthens his profile as a kind of tea party folk hero for whom Washington’s hatred is a badge of honor.

The GOP’s open exasperation with Cruz has mounted over several weeks, as the senator waged a theatrical and hopeless quest that culminated in a 21-hour floor speech denouncing Obamacare. The leaders of his own caucus — Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas — publicly questioned Cruz’s demand that senators oppose cloture even on a House-approved bill with no Obamacare funding, because of the certainty that Senate Democrats would re-insert funding on a later vote. Cruz angered House Republicans, too, by suggesting last week that the Senate would be unlikely to enact the conservative-friendly House bill.

Cruz allies say the senator has long been prepared to go down fighting in an impossible effort to block funding for the ACA. In fact, that was the whole point of his crusade, which was never really expected to function as a legislative strategy.

The question for Cruz, as he weighs the next steps in his rapid political ascent, is whether all this has worked as a political strategy despite the consensus view of him in official Washington as a deeply annoying publicity hound.

And in the waning hours of Cruz’s anti-Obamacare stemwinder, GOP elites grudgingly acknowledged that the same tactics that turned countless Beltway Republicans against Cruz probably only enhanced his standing with the conservative grass roots.

“He’s hurting himself with the D.C. establishment in order to help himself with the base in Iowa and elsewhere. D.C. is interested in whether something is going to be effective. Conservative caucus activists aren’t concerned about that,” said Republican presidential strategist David Kochel, Mitt Romney’s former top Iowa adviser.

The downside to the Cruz approach, Kochel said, is that “he looks like it’s all just complete grandstanding to no effect whatsoever except to call attention to himself. It’s not like the Rand Paul filibuster, which actually did affect public policy and start a real conversation. The conversation on Obamacare was already had and is still being had.”

Faith and Freedom Coalition head Ralph Reed, the longtime conservative organizer, said few Republican voters will heed the critique that Cruz’s strategy had no hope of actually defunding Obamacare.

“The grass roots understands that this was a very uphill struggle and that it’s going to be very difficult to achieve the desired outcome of defunding Obamacare,” Reed said. “I think the larger point is that the grass roots of both parties are hungering for two things: one, authenticity; and secondly, intestinal fortitude.”

Inside Washington, there’s far less regard for what some of Cruz’s chief supporters — groups such as the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund — view as his political heroics and feature in their fundraising emails.

It’s not just entrenched Washington legislators who have recoiled from Cruz’s hectoring attitude toward the ACA issue: the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page sneered at “the supposedly intrepid General Cruz” for urging House Republicans into a potentially catastrophic government shutdown. At a New Hampshire GOP fundraiser in August, Romney, the GOP’s 2012 standard-bearer, pointedly warned his party to “exercise great care about any talk of shutting down government.”